Supernatural: Next Generation

Claire was at church, much like every Sunday since they had started traveling together. Outside of his daily showers, it was the only time that Ben was separate from her. Since Jesse’s joining them, however, even that had changed. To be completely truthful, Ben didn’t really mind. He’d been hunting mostly lone for the past seven years; it felt good to have company again. He didn’t feel the need to fill every single hour with hunting down monsters and his father when he had them there.

The only problem was that Jesse was still green to everything. Claire had taken up teaching him how to defend himself without his powers, and since he was supposed to be injured Ben opted to take up the more “geeky” of the options: monster facts and hunter knowledge basics. Of course, that job came with at least two dilemmas: first, that his patience was thin when he was frustrated; second, that Jesse was not the bookish type by a long shot. Ben was half-tempted to get Claire to pick up that part of the training as well, seeing as it would be more challenging to Jesse to defend himself and to try recalling hunting trivia at the same time, but pride held him back.

“What do you do to banish a ghost?” Ben asked without looking up from his notebook.

“Burn the b’nes.” Jesse’s answer came out a bit muffled because he was currently balancing a pen between his nose and upper lip.

It wasn’t that Jesse didn’t appreciate Ben’s effort, or that he didn’t understand the importance of what he was learning. There was just so much he could take in a day. He’d never had to be attentive in school in the first place, so it was hard to start now.

“What do you do before you burn them?” Ben asked, looking up with a slight frown on his mouth.

“S’lt,” he said, his eyes crossed in concentration. That was an easy thing. Salt took out most things, including him.

Ben flipped through a few pages of his notebook. “Of these three things, what works to disable a vamp: holy water, dead man’s blood, or garlic?”

Jesse hesitated a moment. “Dead ma--fuck.” He caught the pen as it tumbled then leaned back for another try. “Blood.”

“Dead mafuck blood?” Ben asked, his lips twisting in a small smirk. “Is that your final answer?”

Jesse snatched the pen away with a grin. “Dead man’s blood, asshole.”

“Don’t make me hit you with a yard stick, boy,” Ben said in his best old-granny voice, the flipped a few more pages.

“List three creatures affected by iron.”

Leaning forward on his knees, Jesse thought. “Demons.” Easy. “Ghosts.” Probably. And.... “Vampires?”

“Wrong,” the younger man answered. “One more try.”

With a huff, Jesse leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. If it was one of those stupid complicated things he’d never heard of before, he wasn’t going to remember. “Witches?”

“Legend,” Ben said. “Witches can be as normal and apple-pie as the chick at Taco Bell. Faeries.” He looked down at his book again, trying to find something a bit harder to go from. He could have him work on his Holy Water Latin, but Ben had a feeling Jesse would stop cooperating if he did. He was honestly surprised the other man had lasted this long without wanting a smoke break.

“What’s the easiest way to tell someone is a skinwalker?”

“Stab them with a silver knife,” Jesse said, his hand swiping the air.

“A less dangerous way to check if someone’s a skinwalker,” Ben rephrased, smirking a little. “We can’t just go stabbing people.”

“Maybe you can’t,” Jesse said, before running his hands over his face. Right. Skinwalkers. “Well if someone you know is acting funny, you can try stabbing them.”

“Retinal flare in a camera,” Ben informed him, frowning just a little. “It’s a safer bet, and it saves a bail-out from jail for first-degree assault.”

“Right. I’ll just make sure and take a camera everywhere if I think a skinwalker’s around,” Jesse said, facing Ben in a slouch. “It’ll never see me coming.”

“You can check in a camera phone as well, dumbass,” Ben answered, grabbing a post-it note, balling it up, and throwing it at Jesse, who batted it away. “If it’s people killing people, it’s not our business. Creatures, spirits, and demons only. We can’t go stabbing people.” He looked down again at the open notebook in his lap.

Jesse wanted to snark at that, but it wasn’t worth the effort. Besides, he didn’t disagree. “Yeah, can’t save everyone. Just gotta be ready at all times.” He said the words blandly enough, as though parroting them from somewhere. ( So Ben didn’t see it coming until Jesse was up and tackling him out of his chair. )

- THEN -

NOW

Jesse was quiet on the ride back. Part of him was back sixteen years ago, on the night an angel had come to kill him, a demon had come to rescue him, and a man had told him he had a choice, so he picked neither. Part of him was stuck with that girl, how panicked she had been when she woke up, the confusion of everything she’d gone through, and the calm that had spread over her when Jesse helped explain those memories.

The demon had crawled inside her, used her like a puppet. Jesse didn’t need to get inside people. He made them puppets with words. How different was what the demon done to that girl from what he did to her? Not much. That’s why he’d felt it, deep in his stomach when he saw the girl Abbey. He’d recognized her, alright. He saw himself.

Ben had been excited to pull his prank once they were back home, but looking over at his friend where he sat, sullen and pensive, the excitement drained from him. They were on a hunt for real now; the party was over. There was no way to know if the demon had gone far, but by all accounts they needed to at least try to find out. It’d snatched whatever girl it had very deliberately. Maybe they could find a connection. His hand came up to Jesse’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

( “You okay, man?” )

***

Color Claire unsurprised when she ran through the usual routine when tracking someone to find Lisa Hale wasn’t anywhere to be found among co-eds or coworkers. A few phone calls from an untraceable pre-paid specifically purchased for the purpose resulted in what all three of them already knew: Lisa had uprooted. Because Lisa was--at least for some period of time--not Lisa.

But the trail hadn’t gone cold yet. With the security around public campuses as it was, just wandering into a dorm and asking around would’ve brought out attention she wasn’t keen on, but apparently the dorm the girl lived and worked in held a weekly event every Saturday night--a mixer for the surrounding dorms and off-campus students. Open to all.

Claire leaned close to the bathroom mirror, carefully drawing a dark brown liner just above her lashes. Her hair was finally dry, set in a slightly tighter curl than was natural, thanks to a pomegranate smelling cream. Combined with slightly heavier make-up around her eyes and the slightly revealing outfit, she thought she looked like a twenty-one year old ready to ‘hit the bar’ for her own self-destructive initiation into adulthood. Claire rolled her shoulders back and stared hard at the image. ( It reminded her of a few things from her past. )

***

They could hear the throbbing of the music from their parking spot along the street. The sidewalks were crowded with chatty women in tight clothes and the scent of beer was on the air. Jesse kept getting ahead of Ben and Claire and then had to wait for them to catch up. He was positively bouncing to get his first taste of college life. The walls of the building had even been decorated for the party, covered in squiggles of what must have been some serious glow-in-the-dark paint. They were practically giving off light.

He was already bobbing along to the band as they finally made it through the doors, pushing past the ring of smokers. They were pressed up against people it was so crowded and a blacklight made t-shirts and teeth glow. He knew they were there for a job and he had to be serious, but he just had to turn to Ben and Claire and tell them how cool it was. Only he stopped short, his eyes going wide.

( “You got some of that paint, too!” he said with a laugh, pointing and the elaborate circle that glowed on Claire’s chest. )

***

When they got back to the hotel, they found out that seven different people had been reported missing in the area. There appeared to be no real link between them, which made it all the more frustrating. Ben pulled his hair out as he went over the profiles with a fined toothed comb. They were varying ages, upstanding citizens, no major records on file, everything was squeaky clean. It made no sense. His head hurt. Were they all possessions? But why here and now?

“Doesn’t make any damn sense,” Ben muttered. If they were possessions, they would have just stayed in the area and corrupted the people not too unlike the one in the Thompson Hall had, but they were gone. It was as if they’d vanished. Jesse wasn’t much help, pacing the room. He hadn’t taken too well to Ben’s insistence that they stay. As far as Jesse was concerned, the job was finished enough.

“What were you going on about before? About glowing paint?” Ben asked, looking up from the screen. However, before Jesse got a chance to respond, Ben’s phone rang: Mama, I'm coming home / Times gone by seems to be / You could have been a better fri-- He picked it up quickly and put it to his ear.

( “Hey mom, it’s kind of a bad--” )

****

Elliot Prescott paused at the red light just before the turn-off for the interstate, rubbing his eyes and sighing. The red bull he’d drank earlier was finally starting to wear off, but he’d promised to pick up Taco Bell for his friend and potential girlfriend Haley when he was heading home from work. She was pulling an all-nighter on an essay that was due the following morning. It was the least he could do. Distractedly he turned his eyes off the road, catching the sight of a pretty blonde girl with her thumb out, walking up the street. It was enough to make him roll his window out.

“Y’need a ride?” he shouted out the window, his eyes moving back to the light briefly out of paranoia. She smiled at him and trotted quickly up to the car.

“My car broke down!” she replied, her accent foreign. He winced in sympathy and unlocked the door, which she slid into.

“Thanks so much, I was really starting to get creeped out by everyone who was stopping,” she said, bending over herself to rub her feet. She’d been wearing heels. Elliot once again felt sympathetic.

“Yeah, that was kind of a crazy idea. All kinds of crazies out this late. Don’t you have a cell?”

“Battery’s dead,” she said replied with a weak smile. Elliot made a noise of dissent as he changed lanes. It was another 20 minutes before they reached his primary side destination.

“I can let you out at the Taco Bell so you can use their phone, maybe?” he offered. The blond just shook her head.

“Nah, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got my charger on me. Can I use your lighter socket?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem.”

The blonde reached into her purse, but instead pulled out what looked like an old goblet, followed by a knife. He barely had a second to respond before she was pressing the knife to his throat.

“Pull over.”

“Shit!” Elliot breathed out emphatically, doing as she said. “Okay, easy!” They were off the road in mere seconds, but he was already shaking. Was this a robbery? Would she take his money, or the car, too? “Please don’t take my car, I’m still paying on it. Here, here’s my wallet--”

( “I don’t want your money.” )

Claire wasn’t normally one to partake in childish things; the latter part of her childhood had been put on fast forward, and she never went to college. She was barely used to things like mutual cohabitation in the last several years, so when she discovered every piece of underwear she owned crudely sewn together like a string of paper dolls--and the not-so-innocent faces on the two men that now shared her life--needless to say, she felt a bit out of her element.

Luckily, Claire was an expert at internet research. So as she endured going commando for a day (a fact both Ben and Jesse found perfect for comments), Claire stocked up on the finer points of dorm-like living.

She’d start small, she promised herself. Hence the reason why she woke earlier than normal the morning after she snuck out of bed once both of them were asleep. She’d found a lovely neon pink colored nail polish at the 7-11 last night, and now it adorned Jesse’s finger and toe-nails, complete with White-Out penned daisies on the end of each long, masculine digit.

That acrid smell in the room on top of the scent of breakfast and coffee she brought in for the three of them? Superglue. No nailpolish remover was getting rid of her work anytime soon.

It was the smell of food that woke him up first, though Ben noticed the subtle difference from what it normally smelled like. His nose wrinkled up in distaste as he slowly rolled onto his side and pushed up. It had been his turn on the pull-out couch, and even with the nicer-quality rooms that Jesse had gotten them used to lately, he still hated how low-to-the-ground they were. It always threw him for a loop.

( “Mornin’,” he said in a tired voice, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. )

***

It both felt like Jesse had been training forever and that he was completely new to it. Sometimes the moves would come easy, the learned steps as instinctive as breathing. Other times Claire laid him flat without hardly moving a muscle.

Practicing out on the overgrown lot behind the motel made that second option suck all the more. Jesse circled cautiously, watching Claire’s chest to see which way she’d move next. He had an already-healing scrape on his arm from where she’d tripped him up, but he managed to get to his feet before being pinned. He liked to think this was getting tougher for her.

Which, he was, and Claire didn’t miss an opportunity to let him know that. She was a firm believer in giving praise as a reward, and quickly correcting mistakes so that they’d be remembered. By this point, he’d seen most - if not all - of her coordinated ways to take him off guard, but it was the quick thinking on his feet that really mattered. Steam from the early morning chill puffed and evaporated with her breath, held on purpose a split second before she lunged at his side with a grab for his wrist and shoulder, then faked back and tried to sweep his weight-bearing foot out from under him.

( At the very last second, a blaring and unexpected noise screeched out from Ben’s direction. )

***

It was too short of a trip to get either of them back in the car, but Ben didn’t let that bother him. He did, however, take advantage of his position in the front seat and Jesse’s inability to see his hands by messing with any spare patch of skin on Claire’s body while she drove, much to her chagrin and pink-cheeked glances. He was pretty sure by the end of the drive he had her worked up, but Ben didn’t take it a single step further. Instead, he immediately went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him, making sure to take his bag and laptop along just to be sure they didn’t mess with his stuff while he was out of sight.

From her sit on the dingy trucker-hotel bed, Claire looked at the closed bathroom door for the fifth time in ten minutes, and shook her head. No doubt in her mind, now, that his disappearance was fully intentional. She went back to filling the shotgun shells spread on a towel in front of her with rock salt.

“He’s either brooding or wants us to think he’s brooding,” she said to Jesse without looking up.

“Or he’s jerking off,” Jesse said, capping the shells as she finished with them. “He’s got his laptop in there.” The twist of his smile said he was joking, though inwardly we wasn’t so sure.

( “I can hear you, yanno!” Ben shouted from the bathroom. )

***

The ride out to the abandoned sanitarium was relatively uneventful, but what greeted them when they arrived certainly wasn’t. The building was no longer abandoned and appeared to have been converted into some sort of horror-based amusement park. Ben stared at the building from the driver’s seat with a frown as he pulled into a parking spot as close as he could manage to get without being conspicuous. Maybe this was a dud hunt, but then he thought back to the stories about tourist spots being haunted; they weren’t always bogus. It still deserved a thorough look.

However, night-time seemed to be their main operating hours. The occasional shriek could be heard echoing through one of the many windows of the building, interlaced with the throbbing ambient music the proprietors had decided on.

“I’m gonna interview some of the people in the parking lot,” Ben said as he pocketed the keys. “Call me if any real ghosts show up.”

Don’t remember this from the stories, Claire thought to herself, scowling at the looming building, made orange by early dusk. Tourist trap or not, it still looked like it should be condemned, if it wasn’t already. Nevertheless, she slipped out of the passenger seat and held the door by a hip for Jesse. She dipped back into the open window, holding on the GTO’s roof.

“Quick rounds, we’ll be out in a half hour at most. If not,” she pressed her lips into that you know what to do expression.

Jesse nodded firmly, his eyes overly wide. “See you back here then.”

Ben nodded, watching as Claire started off before reaching out to grab Jesse’s arm briefly.

“Keep her safe, okay?” he said, low and quick.

It felt like a fist closed over inside Jesse’s chest. He could only manage a nod before he quickly followed after Claire. Ben didn’t need to worry. Jesse was going to do it right this time. He wasn’t leaving Claire’s side until she was back safe in the car.

The front walk to the main office of the complex was the only accessible path--everything else had been blocked off by chain link or sheet metal, obviously for security and cheesy industrial effect. Claire would’ve liked to make her own way in, but this was just a casing. If they needed, they’d come back later.

It was the inside of the building that threw her for a loop. Not fixed up by any means, but the space had definitely been altered to be ‘livable’, and right there in front of what had surely been a nurses station thirty years ago, two heads perked at the sound of their entrance. Claire looked at Jesse, mumbling, “Apparently we’re early,” before she set her eyes on the two behind the counter.

The brunet flashed a winning smile at them, adjusting his glasses with a push of his finger before barreling into what no doubt was a well-rehearsed speech:

( “Hello there, fellow ghost hunters! Welcome to the official Ghostfacers Haunted Asylum!” )

TO BE CONTINUED...